I hear you. Didn’t mean for that to come across as an attack on you.

Lemmy is such a fickle place. Just a few days ago people were clamoring for Democrats to make a purely performative abortion vote that would be doomed to fail, merely because it would send an important signal to voters. Now people are skeptical that performative signal votes are sincere because they won’t go anywhere. Not saying you, specifically, but the whiplash is really frustrating.

Second, sure, it’s a low risk bill because they know it won’t go anywhere, but damn isn’t it good news that somebody is putting their money where their mouth is? Maybe we just need to primary in more Dems who will sign on and help push it through?

https://rankthevote.us/raskin-beyer-welch-bill-would-bring-ranked-choice-voting-to-congressional-elections/

not doing good things that make people’s lives better

They sit back and watch the world burn

They spent billions to upgrade drinking water infrastructure across the country, as well as roads and bridges. They protected and strengthened the Affordable Care Act by allowing states to extend postpartum coverage up to 12 months, by disallowing several state-level work requirements for Medicaid, by fixing the “family glitch”, by dropping the number of uninsured by 3.5%, by allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices, by capping the price of insulin, and by banning surprise billing for out-of-network care. They raised the minimum wage for federal workers. They forgave billions in student loans. They expanded VA health care and benefits for veterans exposed to burn pits, Agent Orange, and other toxic substances. They rescheduled marijuana. They established decade-long tax credits for everything from electric vehicles to direct air capture and sequestration of carbon dioxide. They ratified the international Kigali Amendment on reducing HFCs. They implemented drinking water standards for PFAS. I could go on, but I’m bored.

Get your fingers out of your fucking ears, open your eyes, and stop repeating baseless propaganda. I’ll also echo what the commenter above suggested:

kindly shut the fuck up. I’m an American, I’ve ACTUALLY had to live in this country with Trump and Biden as president, and it’s no contest for me.

edit: Downvoting incontrovertible facts. Again. This community never ceases to amaze me.

You’ll find that happens a lot around here. There’s a startling amount of myopic reflexiveness in the Lemmy crowd, and they don’t like a disagreement with the doom loop, even if it’s presented respectfully.

As shitty as this will be for the people of Argentina, it will be intriguing to see what a true right-wing fanatic is able to fuck up when given the authority to do so.

I’m not going to argue against what you think you heard 20 years ago, except to say that if you don’t believe Trump is the single most dangerous candidate to ever run for the presidency, then you go into 2024 more optimistic than me. I pray for our health and safety in 2025, and if his next coup attempt succeeds where the last one failed, I pray that we’ll survive the bloodshed after the fall.

Yes the alternative is worse, but election after election you can’t just keep handing centrists your vote who don’t give a shit about you or your policies (and actively shit on you while loudly posturing that they aren’t like you at all). At some point you have to make the threat of withholding your vote a real one, there are always consequences to that especially for this election but at the same time nothing is really going to change if we keep handing centrist corporate democrats the reigns to power because this time is an emergency too (just like last time).

Here’s where you’re missing something fundamental. You’re taking as a given that a protest vote will meaningfully register with the Democratic Party, and they’ll chase you around to get your vote back. I’d offer that a significant reason major US parties have drifted rightward over the past 40 years is this. Conservatives skew older. Leftists skew younger. Young people simply don’t vote. Ergo conservatives have an outsized voice in the political sphere. When more leftists disengage, the conservative voice grows louder.

If you protest vote the Democratic Party, you’re just proving to them that they can’t count on your vote. If they can’t count on your vote, they have the option of scrambling to try to figure out what you want, or chasing voters whose support they can count on, and based on recent history that’ll probably result in more of a shift to the right. Because, at the end of the day, right-leaning voters have a weird fervor that leftists don’t share, and leftists disengage at the drop of a hat. If we’re being honest, that’s not a great group of people to have on your team if you’re trying to sustain political relevance.

If your apathy opens the door to a Republican supermajority in your state legislature, then they can more easily a) strip rights from your friends and neighbors, b) assist in the ratification of amendments and calling of Constitutional Conventions, c) gerrymander away your power to influence Congress, d) remove your city’s ability to govern itself, among others. Down-ballot races can potentially affect all of us.

You’re right, but the people beating their chests all over the internet about taking some kind of moral high ground or voting with their conscience also should be mindful that many of us will be the first people strung up on the wall if Trump’s fascist vision comes to pass, so we’re more than a little uneasy at how cavalier they are about the dangerous situation we’re currently in. People should place whatever vote they think will keep Trump as far away from power as physically possible. Right now all signs are pointing to his counterpart from the other major party, because none of the 3rd party candidates have either the campaign infrastructure or the policy chops to carry them through to the finish line. So if it turns out that best option is Joe Biden, so be it. If it’s not, so be it. But in either case the singular goal should be to keep Trump away from DC. Everything else is just white noise.

1. It was never dominant the way Google is.

2. That was in the early days of the internet, when things changed on a fundamental level quite frequently. I’m very specifically making a point about today, not 1995.

Yeah the niches have been filled. Facebook is the personal profile networking thing, Instagram is the photo thing, X-Twitter is the “shout your inner monologue” thing, Reddit the anonymous networking thing, TikTok the short vid thing, Tinder the sex thing. Alternatives to the dominant platforms just won’t catch on because no new gadget is more valuable than a critical mass. We’re in the late stage of social media Phase I, and it’ll take something fundamentally (not cosmetically) different to shake us out of Phase I and kick off Phase II.

Palestine ≠ Hamas

Assuming you give a shit, of course. I’ve not seen more than a handful of lunatics defend Hamas. Most folks are just trying to avoid exactly the same conflation you’re using here, because there are innocent Palestinians caught up in this bullshit, and they don’t deserve to be murdered any more than Israelis do.

Holy fuck, dudes.

That’s quite literally not what they said. You’ll get better responses if you don’t argue against what people are not saying.

Boil it down even further than OP and everything, ultimately, is just binary impulses between differently oriented clusters of atoms.

Time and time again I find myself coming back to a deterministic interpretation of the physical world. We’re now at the point where a simple scrape-predict-regurgitate AI language model (ChatGPT) can convincingly imitate the communication pattern of a human being with good factual recall but low social acumen, almost like what we generally associate with the autism spectrum. It’s harder and harder to argue that we aren’t just walking flesh bags with simple electrical impulses that carry us from decision to decision based on a finite dataset. It’s amazingly complex and sometimes can seem unpredictable, but it’s still finite. Were we ever able to build a sufficiently complex computer, I believe it could predict every decision we ever make with remarkable accuracy. The concept of “free will”, at least to me, seems a comfortable agreed-upon illusion that keeps us from killing and eating one another.

NPR interviewed a woman in the local Republican Party in Gaetz’s district. Her response to this shitstorm:

“The less Congress does, the better it is for all Americans.”

These people are fucking morons.

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Military secrets have existed since the dawn of civilization when the first savannah tribes kept their spear cache hidden until it was time to attack the neighboring clans. Aliens have never been even kinda confirmed with anything even whispering in the general direction of scientific evidence.

So when something weird/unexpected happens and the military says, “We can’t talk about that”, the logical course of action is to conclude that it’s likely the exact same kind of secret folks like them have been keeping for literal millennia, and not that it’s suddenly the most fundamentally groundbreaking discovery that’s ever taken place on this planet or in our solar system. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and “we saw something we can’t identify” ain’t extraordinary anything.

Can I get that process started? Where do I put the url in directly to subscribe from kbin if/when the 404 error is corrected?